Jaws of life

In his discomfiting 1998 book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind painted a none-too-flattering portrait of a post-Jaws Steven Spielberg. The author portrayed him as a raging egomaniac who wanted a writing credit on the film, though he contributed very little to the script. Indeed, the film's most famous monologue, Quint's speech about the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis, was penned by an uncredited Howard Sackler and rewritten by the man who delivered it, Robert Shaw. Biskind also writes of how Spielberg was so sure he was going to be nominated for a Best Director Academy Award that he invited a television crew to his office the morning the nominations were announced "to film his reaction to the good news." Only, there was none: Jaws was nominated for Best Picture ("because of the grosses," Biskind opines), and editor Verna Miles received a nod for her superb editing work, but the director was passed over for the likes of Milos Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), Robert Altman (Nashville), Stanley Kubrick (Barry Lyndon), Sidney Lumet (Dog Day Afternoon), and Federico Fellini (Amacord). "I can't believe it," Spielberg groused to the camera crew. "They went for Fellini instead of me!"

Biskind also writes of how Spielberg tried to get out of directing the film during the six months of pre-production, as he was convinced he was making little more than Roger Corman schlock--"an exploitation movie," the filmmaker says in the book, "Moby Dick without Melville." (Peter Benchley, author of the novel and collaborator on the screenplay, told the Los Angeles Times that the director was "B-movie literate," so perhaps there was something to it.) Spielberg even tried to figure out how to frag himself, to literally break his own leg, so Universal would be forced to find a replacement.

Such unbecoming revelations are nowhere to be found on the July 11 DVD release of Jaws, the first of Spielberg's seminal films to be released in the format (cf. Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., and Raiders of the Lost Ark). Instead, the hour-long making-of documentary, condensed from the two-hour version that appeared on the 1995 laserdisc, celebrates the collision of brains and balls--the right man at the right place at the right time. Spielberg speaks of how, as a young man making what would become the first summer blockbuster, he was "more courageous, or I was more stupid--I'm not sure which." He talks about how he was drawn to the story because it had a great deal in common with his 1971 made-for-TV Duel, with Dennis Weaver being stalked by the unseen driver of a monstrous semi. Both films, Spielberg believed, were about "leviathans preying on Everyman," and he went to great lengths to connect the two: The same sound effect, that of a roaring dinosaur, was used in Duel's climactic crash and Jaws' finale, when the bloody, blown-up shark sinks to the bottom of the sea.

Steven Spielberg, courageous and stupid on the set of Jaws

In the end, issues of credit and blame matter little. In this digitally restored version--available in anamorphic widescreen, in both Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS formats, with deleted scenes and outtakes and a handful of trailers presented for the first time--Jaws remains the perfect film, at once hysterical and terrifying. The "born entertainer," as critic Pauline Kael once referred to Spielberg, turned pulp into gold, mocking old-school Hollywood (Robert Shaw, whose death becomes a screaming, bloody punch line) while ushering in the era of the New Hollywood blockbuster (it made $129 million, a record box-office take until the release of Star Wars in 1977). It was art house (hand-held camera) meets big budget (a mechanical shark that never worked), a comedy that became a horror film until the two elements are inseparable.

Every scene sticks somewhere between your heart and your throat, until you have no idea whether it's meant to be taken straight-faced or as parody; as Kael wrote in the New Yorker in November 1976, "though Jaws has more zest than a Woody Allen picture, and a lot more electricity, it's funny in a Woody Allen way," referring especially to the scene in which ichthyologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and Quint compare battle scars on board the Orca. Spielberg would never again make a film loaded with such rich characters, so dynamic a cast, or so engaging a tale. After Jaws, his inner child took over, only to fly to outer space and return all grown-up, a maker of serious, thoughtful epics (Meaningful Statements) and disposable pop art (Meaningful Camp). Never again would his movies, not even Raiders, be so much fun.

To see Jaws in its widescreen format again after so many years of watching it on HBO and TNT, shrunken and expurgated, is to be reminded of how thrilling it can be to see nothing at all. The malfunctioning shark isn't seen during the first half of the 125-minute film. Before computer-generated effects allowed filmmakers to show off their sterile technology, Spielberg lucked out by being forced to hint rather than reveal. And though he always insisted the shark was the star of the film, the DVD allows for humanity that history has always obscured. One of the deleted scenes, taken from early in the movie, shows Ellen Brody (Lorraine Gary) and her husband, Amity police chief Martin (Roy Scheider), at home, sorting through a bag of his old New York City belongings. "I used to wear this to the Garden," Martin says, wistfully. Then, he is reminded of why he moved his family to this quiet, seaside town: "Locked doors, muggings, dog dirt" (Scheider dubs the last part, as his mouth says, "dog shit"). He tells her to sell the old clothes, to be rid of the lousy past.